Marsh Hawk Press is a poetry collective. Our books' forms and sensibilities assimilate modern and post-modern traditions but expand from these without political or aesthetic bias.

Saturday, November 22, 2014

THREE QUESTIONS: NORMAN FINKELSTEIN

Marsh Hawk Press offers a "Three Questions" Series for its authors to discuss individual titles -- an index to the Series is available HERE. We are pleased to present this Q&A with Norman Finkelstein and his 2010 book:

Some, but by no means all readers, will
recognize that the “ghost voices” that rise up from under the line at the “end”
of many of these poems is a device originally used by Jack Spicer in the
“Homage to Creeley” section of his book Heads
of the Town Up To the Aether. It has also been employed, with a
somewhat different twist, by Nathaniel Mackey (in Mackey’s work, the text below
the line is often as long as the original poem, and serves almost as a
rewriting or a different “take” on the original). Once I got into it, the
device offered all sorts of possibilities, and intensified what I understand to
be the dark comedy of the poems, a comedy also based in discursive code
switching, ellipsis, non sequitur, and ironic allusion.

2)
Please share some responses to your book that’s surprised you, or made you
happy or disappointed. If your book is relatively new, share some of your
hopes for how readers might respond or how the book finds its way in the world.

Since my feeling about Ghost Factory is that the poems inhabit a space somewhere between
humor and terror (at least, that’s how I felt while writing them), I was
surprised to hear recently from a new reader that he found the book consoling after suffering the loss of a
beloved mentor. Needless to say, I was very moved by this response, and it has
led me to reflect on what exactly is going on in these poems, which are often
as mysterious to me as to any of my readers. Perhaps there is something
comforting about finding out that you’re not alone in the dark—even when
whatever is there with you is not necessarily concerned with your best
interests.

3)
If you had to choose a favorite poem or a poem to highlight from the book,
which one would you choose and why?

I have great affection for a lot of the
poems in Ghost Factory; I find them
weirdly companionable and charming years after having written them. And they
opened a door on whole new dimension in my poetry, which continues up until
today in the series I’ve been working on recently, From the Files of the Immanent Foundation. I guess my favorite, or
one I would highlight, is “Advertisement.” It was the second poem in the
sequence, but the first in which the possibilities of that particular kind of
discourse really opened up. And not incidentally, it came to me as one of the
purest instances in all my years of writing of what Spicer calls “dictation.” I
was alone in the house, I had poured myself a glass of wine, I opened my
notebook, and in an instant the poem began to write itself. Looking back, I see
that the poem is dated 11/16/06. The draft is absolutely clean. A gift.